- Study: Birth weight may play role in stroke risk
Source: NDTV [India]
“Your birth weight may be more important than your current adult weight when it comes to your risk of stroke later in life. A new study hints that people who were born with a low birthweight may face a higher risk of stroke in young adulthood, even if they are not overweight or underweight as adults. This suggests that what happens in the womb and during early birth can leave a long-term mark on the brain’s blood-supply system, which may show up as higher stroke risk several years later. The study is set to be presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO2026) in Istanbul, Turkey (12-15 May). Dr Lina Lilja and Dr Maria Bygdell of the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, who are study authors and colleagues say that low birthweight can be included in stroke risk assessment for adults.” (04/06/26)
- Newly Obtained Video of Minneapolis Shooting Exposes ICE Gang Lie
Source: New York Times
“Almost immediately after an immigration agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis this winter, the federal government cast the injured man as an attempted murderer and the agent as the victim of a brutal beating. … video footage of the shooting, newly obtained by The New York Times, raises questions about why it took weeks for the government’s case to fall apart. The video contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.” (04/06/26)
- Scientists identify “neural fingerprint” of psychedelic drugs in the brain
Source: The Guardian [UK]
“Scientists have identified a hallmark signature produced by psychedelic drugs in the human brain when users experience their mind-altering effects. The ‘neural fingerprint’ of the psychedelic trip was spotted among hundreds of brain scans of people on LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline and ayahuasca, pointing to a shared impact on the brain’s behaviour. The finding emerged from a major study that combined 11 brain imaging datasets from around the world in an effort to build a reliable picture of how the substances temporarily rewire the brain. The insights are increasingly important as researchers investigate the drugs in clinical trials as potential therapies for severe mental health and neurological conditions such as depression, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder.” (04/06/26)
- SCOTUS paves way for Steve Bannon contempt case to be dismissed
Source: NBC News
“The Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for the Trump administration to dismiss the criminal case against Trump ally Steve Bannon over his failure to respond to congressional subpoenas. Although Bannon was convicted and served jail time, he and the Trump administration are now seeking to have the case thrown out after the fact, in what would be a mostly symbolic outcome. … Bannon was convicted in 2022 on two counts of contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with the subpoenas, which sought documents and testimony related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters.” (04/06/26)
- Nigeria: Regime troops rescue 31 Easter worshippers after deadly church attack
Source: France 24 [French state media]
“The Nigerian military said Sunday it had rescued 31 worshippers seized from Easter celebrations in northwestern Kaduna state, though at least five others were killed, as the country’s security comes increasingly under international scrutiny. Gunmen raided a Catholic and an evangelical church, the Christian Association of Nigeria chairman for Kaduna state Caleb Bawa Ma’aji told AFP. The kidnapping at a village located around 100 kilometres (62 miles) north of the capital, Abuja, occurred despite the police chief ordering a ‘massive security deployment’ including at places of worship during the Easter festival.” (04/06/26)
- Dog bites man: Senile reality TV star rages at SCOTUS because it may uphold Constitution
Source: Independent [UK]
“President Donald Trump has lashed out at the U.S. Supreme Court as it weighs the future of birthright citizenship, characterizing the issue as a ‘money making hoax.’ ‘It’s too bad that the Supreme Court can’t watch and study the Mark Levin Show tonight on the Birthright Citizenship Scam,’ the president posted on Truth Social, late Easter Sunday. ‘If they saw it they would never allow that money making HOAX to continue. THEY SHOULD USE THEIR POWERS OF COMMON SENSE FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY.’ … On Life, Liberty and Levin, the show to which Trump alluded, the host had argued that there is no such thing as birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants who are present in the U.S. illegally [sic], echoing the revisionist, Trumpian point of view.” (04/06/26)
- One Blow After Another: The Leadership Team from Hell on a Hell of a Planet
Source: TomDispatch
by Michael Klare“On March 13th, buried in the New York Times’s coverage of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: ‘As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.’ Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%. Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off.” (04/05/26)
https://tomdispatch.com/the-leadership-team-from-hell-on-a-hell-of-a-planet/
- US Troops In Iran Need To Start Disobeying Orders
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone“At this point if you’re in the US military you have a moral obligation to start refusing orders. Desert. Become a conscientious objector. Ideally, get everyone together and launch a full-scale military coup. We’re in ‘Mad King’ territory. Someone’s gotta do what needs to be done. Promoters of this war told the world it was about liberating the Iranian people from tyranny to bring them freedom and democracy. Now that they got their war it’s about bombing them ‘back to the Stone Age,’ stealing their oil, and blowing up their bridges and power plants. The only people dumber than Americans who bought into Trump’s ‘ending the wars’ shtick are the Iranians who believed the United States was going to bring freedom to their country.” (04/06/26)
- AOC lifts the veil: She won’t help protect innocent civilians, if they’re Israelis
Source: New York Post
by staff“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Queens) is now opposed to funding defensive shields that could save the lives of innocent civilians — if they are Israelis. Seems like she’s trying to win back the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America that spurned her in 2024 for not hating the Jewish state enough. Or maybe she’s just showing her true colors. Her re-hardened anti-Israel position comes even though she isn’t facing any significant opposition in her re-election campaign, which raises and spends so much money it’s more like a good-sized business than a scrappy Bronx-Queens political operation; she doesn’t need the DSA’s endorsement. But she got her fellow antisemitic socialists mad at her because she abstained from voting to deny funding for Israel’s strictly defensive Iron Dome project, which protects Israelis — Jewish and Arab — from the tens of thousands of missiles that have been lobbed from Iran’s regional terror proxies.” (04/06/26)
- Trump and Netanyahu: Two Madmen Playing God
Source: Common Dreams
by Jeffrey D Sachs“Donald Trump and his partner in war crimes, Benjamin Netanyahu, are jointly waging a war of murderous aggression against Iran, a nation of 90 million people. They are in the grip of three cascading pathologies. The first is personality: both are malignant narcissists. The second is the arrogance of power: men who possess the power to command nuclear annihilation and feel, in consequence, no restraint. The third, and most dangerous of all, is religious delusion: two men who believe, and are told daily by those around them, that they are messiahs doing God’s work. Each pathology exacerbates the others, so that together they put the world in unprecedented danger.” (04/06/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/netanyahu-trump-psychopaths-war-criminals
- Pam Bondi Deserved to Be Fired Long Ago
Source: Town Hall
by Derek Hunter“Pam Bondi was fired last week because she deserved to be. I know she’s popular among some, but she was not popular with President Donald Trump, and that’s all that really mattered. The leadership in the Justice Department, including the FBI, has been horrible and feckless. Now that she’s gone, someone has to say that former Attorney General Bondi deserved to lose her job.” (04/06/26)
- Beware the “experts”
Source: spiked
by Cory Franklin“In a Chicago Tribune article last year I wrote, ‘In an ever more complex society, have we run the risk of becoming overly dependent on experts – delegating decisions and responsibilities to them that are outside their domain?’ Several readers called me out, justifiably. They asked whether it was a good idea for anyone other than an expert to fly my plane or perform my open-heart surgery. Point taken. I have spent a lot of time both in planes and operating rooms. Without question, I want experts calling the shots in both of them. … My mistake was in failing to point out the distinction between experts with technical knowledge (the ones who actually know how to do things) and experts who have earned their status primarily as a result of their educational credentials or public opinions.” (04/06/26)
- Journalism’s Better Days
Source: Law & Liberty
by DG Hart“Younger Americans, born after 1985, may have no frame of reference for the current state of journalism which is highly partisan and considered untrustworthy (at least to partisans on the opposite side). The Gallup Organization’s data shows that trust in ‘Mass Media’ (not identical to but related to journalism) is way down, from 72 percent in 1976 to 28 percent in 2025. The reverse is also true. People who answered positively to survey questions about trust in media, whether they had ‘None at all,’ went from 4 percent in 1976 to 34 percent in 2025. In between those answers was ‘Not very much’ trust in media, which hit a high point of 41 percent in 2016 and has fluctuated since (36 percent in 2025).” (04/06/26)
- Congress Is Moving the Goalposts on Fiscal Responsibility
Source: The Daily Economy
by Romina Boccia“Washington has a habit of changing its budget goals — not because the country solved the spending-driven debt problem, but because each goal proved harder than lawmakers were willing to confront. I remember working on fiscal policy in 2011, when lawmakers still talked about balancing the budget. It was an intuitive target. If the government only spent what it collected in revenues, the debt problem would eventually disappear. Simple in theory. Difficult to achieve in practice.” (04/06/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/congress-is-moving-the-goalposts-on-fiscal-responsibility/
- Himes Fact-Checked on “Misleading” Claims About Warrantless Spying
Source: The American Prospect
by James Baratta“After being ambushed by privacy activists outside a town hall in southern Connecticut last week, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, spoke at length about the urgency of extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the warrantless spying program he has been actively lobbying Democratic colleagues to support without reforms. The 702 program is set to expire on April 20. Himes assured protestors that ‘anything I said today, you can sort of check if you want’. In a press release Friday, organizers with QuitGPT and a number of Connecticut-based advocacy groups held him to it: ‘Unfortunately, Himes repeated several false and misleading statements about FISA, the data broker loophole, and AI surveillance.’ Their comments came just hours after a separate virtual town hall last Friday where Himes ‘repeated many of the same statements’ about Section 702.” (04/06/26)
- POTUS Goes Full Stone Age Retard
Source: Antiwar.com
by David Stockman“It’s pretty clear what the TV screen caption should have read as the Donald expectorated a veritable shower of bully boy phlegm and sputum at the White House cameras last night: ‘Attention JD Vance – activate the 25th Amendment now, POTUS has gone full retard into veritable delusionary madness.’ That’s right. There was hardly a sentence in the speech that accords with reality in any way shape or form. Not even remotely. … The yawning disconnect with reality, however, was probably best revealed by Trump’s utterly ludicrous contention that that if he had not cancelled Obama’s JCPOA in May 2018 Iran would have nuked the entire middle east and Israel into oblivion by now.” (04/06/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/david_stockman/2026/04/05/potus-goes-full-stone-age-retard
- The Pentagon Has An Air Power Addiction
Source: Libertarian Institute
by José Niño“Iran is not some fragile backwater that will crumble under the weight of American bombs. It is a civilization state with thousands of years of continuous existence, a population of ninety million people, and a geography of mountains, deserts, and underground fortifications specifically designed to resist foreign subjugation. The notion that air power alone can decapitate its leadership, destroy its infrastructure, and produce regime change represents a fantasy that scholars have debunked repeatedly over the past century. Yet here we are, over a month into Operation Epic Fury, watching Washington learn these lessons the hard way.” (04/06/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-pentagon-has-an-air-power-addiction
- Confronting Both Zionism and the Antisemitism It Welcomes
Source: exile in happy valley
by Nicky Reid“We must all confront Israel, but we must also confront this toxic runoff along with it and we must confront them both simultaneously with the weapon of history. The Jews are not the problem here, Zionism is, and Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism or the Semitic people. In fact, Zionism is really just another malignant cell of white supremacy, and it has long disdained both Judaism and most people of Semitic de[s]cent. Zionism emerged from central and eastern Europe during the mid-19th century as a distinctly secular strain of the same European national swamp that would fester into fascism and national socialism, and it caried many of the same characteristics too; devotion to such toxically contrived notions as ‘blood and soil’ and scientific racism, not to mention a pronounced disdain for the east, including the Jews who once closely identified with it.” (04/05/26)
https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/04/confronting-both-zionism-and.html
- Reclaiming our own birthright: We might need to amend the Constitution
Source: The Hill
by Jonathan Turley“‘Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.’ Those words from Chief Justice John Roberts during this week’s oral arguments signaled that the conservative justices are unlikely to reject birthright citizenship. Of course, nothing is certain until this summer when the Court issues its opinion in Trump v. Barbara. However, we need to consider the need for a 28th Amendment to reaffirm [sic] the meaning of citizenship. As some of us stressed before the oral argument, the odds were against the administration prevailing in the case, given more than a century of countervailing precedent. There are good-faith arguments against reading the 14th Amendment as supporting citizenship for any child born in this country.” [editor’s note: Yes, it is POSSIBLE to be constitutionally and historically illiterate and therefore believe nonsense “in good faith.” But it’s an odd admission for Turley to make – TLK] (04/06/26)
- A journalist who uses AI? The internet was not pleased.
Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle“On Thursday morning, I sat down with one of my chatbots and asked it to round up the best takes on a recent social media controversy. The results were unsatisfying — hallucinations, apologies and search results that weren’t what I’d asked for. After several prompts and corrections, the chatbot seemed to give up. Shortly thereafter, so did I. Fortunately, I was intimately familiar with this controversy, since I touched it off. In social media parlance, I was ‘the main character,’ so I already had plenty of raw material and could see how badly ChatGPT had failed. But if you’re hoping for a column on why artificial intelligence is useless, I regret to disappoint.” (04/05/26)
- Communism’s Obsolescence
Source: Quillette
by Michael Aaron Cody“The structural case for why collectivist systems fail.” (04/05/26)
- Ron Paul Liberty Report, 04/06/26
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“Donald Trump’s ‘Bay of Pigs?'” (04/06/26)
- Reason Interview: Ro Khanna
Source: Reason
“Congress Has Surrendered on War.” (04/06/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/04/06/ro-khanna-congress-has-surrendered-on-war/
- EconTalk, 04/06/26
Source: EconTalk
“The Unseen Work: Stewart Brand on Maintenance and Civilization.” (04/06/26)
https://www.econtalk.org/the-unseen-work-stewart-brand-on-maintenance-and-civilization/
- TechTank, season 5, episode 40
Source: Brookings Institution
“Teens are using AI — but not how we think.” (04/06/26)
https://shows.acast.com/tech-tank/episodes/teens-are-using-aibut-not-how-we-think
- Serious Trouble, 04/05/26
Source: Serious Trouble
“Strictly Prohibited Ballroom.” (04/05/26)
https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/strictly-prohibited-ballroom
- Fountainhead Forum, episode 434
Source: Fountainhead Forum
“David Friedman on anarchism, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and libertarianism.” (04/05/26)